Suzanne,
I definitely agree that measuring staff time and resources needs to be factored in but also hope that it's all part of setting reasonable expectations. And if you're measuring staff resources against just the donations that may or may not come in, I think you'll most often get a completely undervalued ROI. But if you factor in increases in awareness, however you want to look at # of new fans or friends or followers and then exposure to their networks, it's starting to look more realistic for what you're really getting. Overall though, I think the better opportunity for ROI is not to just spend a lot of time building a Cause/Fan/Group page, send messages out to those who connect and watch no money come in but to build the opportunity for community to grow and leverage existing networks to help build out the communities and make the asks for you. I think the ROIs related to enabling those friend asking friend asks will be much more reasonable when the staff resources are focused on that use of social networks.

A recent Washington Post article reported that Facebook Causesamounted to next to nothing in terms of real donations for most charities. According to the article, less than 1% of the people on Facebook who've joined a Cause have ever made a donation and the majority of participating Cause chari...